Most People Don't Want To Die for "Freedom"
The right discovers a fundamental truth about human beings
In this country, we are taught to celebrate putting your life on the line to defend an ideal. Obviously, that’s one reason Americans often thank veterans for their service, but it’s also taught to us as part of grade school history. Remember Patrick Henry? “Give me liberty or give me death!” And Nathan Hale? “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” It’s even played for laughs in “Patton”, where George C. Scott tells his Third Army troops “You don’t win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other dumb bastard die for his.” The entire reason we laugh at that joke is because of course we understand that part of the honor of serving in the military is that you are, in fact, willing to die for your country. And in America that means dying for ideals like freedom and liberty.
But here’s the thing. The entire reason we single out people like Patrick Henry, and more broadly those who choose military service, is because most people DON’T want to die for freedom. That’s not their thing. They have lives they want to lead, and dreams they want to pursue, and often families they want to care for and raise. Indeed, people protested military drafts in the Civil War, World War I, and the Vietnam War.
Conservatives used to understand this. Conservative politics has always had a fear component, a way of stoking trepidations about personal safety. The crime issue is one of the best examples of this- conservatives hyped the crime rate (which was, back in the day, much higher than it is now) and portrayed liberals as too concerned with gooey concepts like people’s rights. It worked political magic for them. They did it with terrorism after 9/11 too- people were scared and voted for the “tough” party who had no qualms about violating the rights of terror suspects and even Americans (remember the “terrorist surveillance program”?) to protect the public. Americans responded to that because they don’t want to be killed in the service of some abstract ideal of liberty.
But in the current debate over vaccines, conservatives have forgotten that. They decided that their party line was going to be that freedom was going to trump the protection of human life. To be clear, this isn’t the first time they’ve done this- this has been their political playbook for global warming for a long time. But there’s a big difference between global warming and the coronavirus- global warming’s effects are often diffuse and occur in the long term. In contrast, COVID-19 has killed over 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.
This past week, as David Frum said, first in The Atlanic and then on Twitter, may have been the week the unvaccinated (which includes plenty of conservatives and Republicans, especially older Americans particularly susceptible to the virus) finally had enough. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noticed the same thing. On Fox News, they started gingerly moving towards a pro-vaccination position. To be sure, there were still lots of caveats and outs, but it looks like elite Republicans are starting to realize that a position that hundreds of thousands of Americans should die for the cause of the freedom to not have to take a couple of needles in one’s arm is not a winning political message.
The only thing that’s surprising about this is that it surprises anyone. The politics of opposition to vaccines are well known and predate COVID. But here’s the key- they rely a lot of free riding. All those parents who were trying to avoid inoculating their special snowflake children with the demon products of our voracious pharmaceutical companies were not actually saying “I’d like my children to die for the cause of freedom”; no, they were actually just free riding. They had some understanding of how “herd immunity” worked and understood that as long as most of the parents were vaccinating their children, they didn’t really have to. (Of course, what actually happened was that once being anti-vax became trendy, herd immunity broke down in some areas. But that wasn’t what the parents had planned.)
Surely some folks looked at the coronavirus vaccines, which were, of course, new and experimental (and thus, there was always the possibility of safety hazards or some sort of terrible mistake), and made a calculation that if the rest of America got the shot, maybe they could get away with waiting until more data came in about safety and perhaps even avoiding a shot altogether. There are also some populations that are historically resistant to the health care system. And thus, there were pockets of opposition to mandatory vaccination even in the beginning- enough to scare politicians and disease experts from proposing it, and enough to convince Republicans that it could be exploited for political gain.
But what happened, of course, is that unlike pre-COVID anti-vax sentiment, where we were already at herd immunity and the threat was a few local outbreaks, with the coronavirus, we were nowhere near herd immunity. We needed people to take the vaccines. That’s the thing about free riding- it only works if everyone else does take the shots. If you actually convince a significant percentage of the public that you are right and that people should hold off, you never get to heard immunity and you end up with a deadly plague. And that’s exactly what happened here.
My point is simple. The politics of free riding are disgusting, but they work as long as the free riders remain a small percentage of the public. But the politics of “my freedom is more important than stopping something that has killed 600,000 Americans” are abominable. Ordinary Americans have no interest in dying for extremely abstract notions of freedom. This fact frustrates me in civil liberties debates- e.g., the fact that we keep tens of thousands of people in prison long after they age out of being criminals just to prevent a handful of violent acts drives me nuts. But everyone who supports civil liberties understands that these are, in fact the politics. You don’t tell people that their fears of criminals getting out of prison too early are illegitimate and that we have to take a risk of some violence to do the right thing. Do that and you will lose elections, as many Democrats did in the 1970’s, ‘80’s, and ‘90’s.
And now Republicans are fitfully, slowly learning that same lesson. As Kris Kristofferson wrote decades ago, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, and people who have plenty to lose don’t want to lose it for someone’s silly assertion of “freedom” from taking a highly effective vaccine.